What is Ribozyme-base medicine?

Question

What is Ribozyme-base medicine?

Answer 1

It is a RNA-based strategy to inhibit HIV replication. They have already demonstrated strong HIV inhibition by ribozymes, Rev binding aptamers, tRNAlys3-ribozyme chimeric RNAs and VA1-antisense. These approaches target viral steps which can possibly mutate. Since the CCR-5 beta-chemokine receptor acts as a co-receptor for M-tropic HIV-1 infection, appears to be essential for HIV life cycle, but is a non-essential human gene, it offers a new and promising target for HIV gene therapy. The alteration of its expression should not affect the physiological function of the modified cells but only interfere with their HIV susceptibility. In order to improve our multivalent RNA based strategy to inhibit HIV infection, they have designed a new hammerhead ribozyme, specifically targeted against HIV receptors.

(Nutshell-using ribozymes -an RNA molecule that catalyzes a chemical reaction- to inhibit HIV process)